With the impacts of climate change hammering us on all sides, the time for small ideas is passing and the time for big ideas has arrived.
And what better place to seek Big Ideas than a True North 2019 workshop? In this case, it was the June 20 workshop titled: Waterloo Region: Canada’s First Carbon-Neutral Region?
The question mark is significant: How could that happen? What would it look like? How would we get there?
Led by people from the TD Bank Group, Accelerator Centre and Sustainable Waterloo Region, the 60 attendees from insurance companies, municipal governments, engineering and design firms, universities and startups were challenged to work through an ideation process by brainstorming ideas, clustering them and prioritizing them, until each table came up with one Big Idea.
In the process, they considered everything from neighbourhood carbon reduction challenges to a tech breakthrough that would create bio-compostable plastics.
Kelly O’Neil, Senior Manager of Environment Affairs for the TD Bank Group, recapped TD’s low-carbon initiative: the 2017 announcement of a CDN$100-billion target in low-carbon lending, financing, asset management and other programs. Although the target was expected to be reached by 2030, the program has already passed the $30-billion mark, with clean technology being seen as one of the greatest opportunities to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy.
Workshop participants were encouraged to come up with big ideas to move
Waterloo Region towards carbon-neutral status. (Communitech photo: Sara Jalali)
John Stevens, Vice-President of Strategy and External Relations at the Accelerator Centre, supports cleantech, noting that the centre is home to the TD Sustainable Future Lab; is a partner in the launch of Waterloo’s sustainability hub, evolvGREEN; and features cleantech prominently among its aspirations.
The scope for cleantech is huge, he says: enviro tech, clean energy, low-carbon transport, sustainable construction, innovative utilities, and distributed grids.
Tova Davidson, Executive Director of Sustainable Waterloo Region, highlighted her non-profit’s involvements, including the popular TravelWise program, the evolvGREEN hub, ChargeWR (which supports electric vehicles), and Climate Action WR.
She shared some stark facts: that the International Panel on Climate Change says we have 11 years to cut emissions by 45 per cent or face a climate disaster; that greenhouse gas (GHG) production in Canada is among the highest in the world on a per capita basis; that Canada is warming twice as fast as anywhere else in the world – “Fires, flooding… the insurance companies will tell you;” and that car ownership in Waterloo Region is growing at twice the rate of population growth: that is, for every new person added to the Waterloo Region population, two motor vehicles are added to the streets. At present, 49 per cent of the GHGs in Waterloo Region come from transportation.
But there were positives. Evolv1, Canada’s first net positive energy office building has set a standard for new construction. The electric car population in Waterloo Region is growing: from just 70 cars in 2013 to 1,478 by 2018. Smog days, once common, are now unheard of, thanks to the closing of coal-fired power generation stations, as Ontario has moved towards cleaner sources of power. Some 100 local organizations that committed to reducing their GHGs by 62,000 tonnes have actually exceeded their goal, “and they are still profitable,” Davidson said.
Workshop attendees discuss ideas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in
Waterloo Region. (Communitech photo: Sara Jalali)
She suggested that finding that intersection of profitability and sustainability could be key to persuading those who are reluctant to change.
With that background, attendees put their heads down and began sharing ideas that could be implemented in Waterloo Region.
Can we limit food waste? Would there be advantages to merging utilities? How can composting be extended to apartment dwellers? Can we bring back a version of freecycle? What works better: incentives, partnerships or regulations? Should all new housing developments include community gardens? How about planting micro-forests for carbon capture?
There was energy in the room as the tables sought consensus on their Big Idea, with the workshop time running out before the ideas did. Organizers promised to summarize the results and make them available to attendees.
Davidson, in her opening remarks, made it clear that there is much to do: “This is the moment. We are standing at the precipice. We don’t have any more time.”
